Display technology is one of significant aspects of computer technology. Devices such as displays, touch screens, projectors or the like have become core output devices for providing visual content to users. With the development of computer hardware technology, the integration and resolution of display devices get increasingly high, and in the meanwhile, the size becomes much smaller and display devices can be more easily combined with portable computer devices. This enables users to experience better display effect on portable computer devices.
In addition, with the constant evolution of various applications running on computer devices, formats of display content as provided to users by various applications become increasingly complicated, while the data amount of display content gets larger and larger. As a result, the following demands might exist when providing display content to users. For example, a map application usually involves large amounts of map data, while users desire to more efficiently display map data on a rather limited display screen (e.g., 800×600 pixels) of a portable computer device. For another example, when a user viewing a photo might desire to compare two figures on the left and right sides of the photo with a higher resolution and also desire to hide other image content between the two figures, etc.
Therefore, it becomes a hot issue of research as to how to more efficiently display on a display device (especially the display of a portable computer device whose display screen is in a limited size) data outputted by an application.